I’m having a break from editioning the first print of my Otakou Press residency in Dunedin and thought I’d share with you foodies the lovely market here. I heard about it from another blogger before I left Australia and made a vow to have breakfast there every Saturday morning to escape from college food. It’s a vow I’ll stick to faithfully! I also wish that I had the facility to cook the occasional meal for myself, because the produce is just so nice. My family are coming over at the end of my residency, so before we start travelling, we’ll stock up on cheeses, fruit and salami, etc to make our own lunches as we tour.

They also have a mobile classroom that teaches a new dish every week. A good idea for the Canberra market!

This was my first course: a fresh hot and enormous dumpling stuffed with roast pork, cabbage and vermicelli noodles.

And this was dessert: a fresh crepe filled with home-made pear and rhubarb jam. Mmmmm…

After that, I was completely visually and physically satiated, so I went for a big walk and caught this view just before the skies opened and gushed down for the rest of the day.

When I first heard about Zoe’s new blog venture it was in the very same breath that I heard of its demise as well.Oh, how disappointed I was.

Enticed by Zoe’s recollection of setting up the site, I was all set to read more of the humour that I had so grown to enjoy at CrazyBrave applied to all things culinary.But then she told of how, in the middle of writing a post about substituting ingredients in a recipe for muesli bars, she was overcome by a moment of extreme self-consciousness, at which point she declared the blog had folded before it even began.

The cause of Zoe’s doubt was an ingredient so utterly pretentious that its name could not be uttered without rousing every latent fear she had concerning accusations of food-related onanism—the likes of which, no doubt, had not been bandied about since the heady days of the Culture Wars, when aficionados of lattes and those purporting to represent lovers of meat pies faced off over barricades built by the Murdoch Press Corps.

Before I knew about the inhibiting effects of the goji berry, however, I got to thinking about the notion of pretentious ingredients.What makes a foodstuff pretentious? What makes a foodstuff down-to-earth, the proverbial humble pie? Who is qualified to declare such things?

I first got the idea for a food blog by posting some cookery related stuff on my personal blog, crazybrave. This is my favourite of those posts, from June 2007.

A word of warning. Some of my best friends are vegan, a choice I respect. This post is not for them, and it and other posts of this ilk will be in the category “Not Safe for Vegans”. Check the category list under the post titles if you’d rather avoid them.)